Tag: Internet Explorer

Don’t start banging me for this, but I had to test something on Windows and thus found out this. I f you need to debug or test something on IE8 on Windows, then you can simply press “F12” and this will bring up the developer tools… could be useful to you, sometime if you are stuck with testing something on IE on windows 🙂

Javascript is an integral part of web browsing and a lot of websites use Javascript for web applications and functions. A question I get at AskTheAdmin.com often is how I can tell if I am using a Javascript enabled browser. I have two quick methods to tell if the browser you are using does or does not support Javascript.

The first thing I recommend is browsing over to a special Java test website called JavaTester. There is code on this page that will tell you if you can run Java Applets and if Javascript is enabled and supported by your browser. The answers will be shown to you on the webpage once it is completed loading.

My favorite part about this site is that it also gives you the HTML code that they used to create the tests. This allows you to add this code to your website to display the results.

When we get to the site this is what we will see:

You will be able to tell at a glance what your browser can and cannot do. For Javascript scroll down to the 3rd bulleted point and after it says: Is Java enabled?, you will either see true or false. True will let you know that you are using a Javascript enabled browser. If it says false you will need to see if Java is installed and if not, install it and enable it.

The Java test website goes on to explain that Java and Javascript are two very different programming languages and pretty much only share the first four letters of their name. To learn the difference between the two languages you can check out these two Wikipedia pages here and here to read about Javascript and Java respectively.

If you are looking for the easiest and quickest test possible the one above is it. But if you also need some more information regarding your browser’s capabilities you can check out this browser capability test website. This is a web application called Browser Hawk.

All three of these web tests will be able to quickly tell you if your browser is actually Javascript enabled. If you have to send a user to a website to test their browser I would send them to the second one from JavaTester as it is the easiest one to see the results on.

If you are a programmer you can easily integrate the code from these pages to create your own test sites on your local intranet or website. If you do code up your own snazzy pages we would love to see them so hit us with the links in the comments.